The present disclosure relates generally to computer systems and service technologies, and more particularly to problem determination using probe collections and problem classification for the technical support services.
An effective problem determination and resolution (PDR) process can contribute to a substantial reduction in technical support services costs. PDR is the process of detecting anomalies in a monitored system, locating the problems responsible for the issue, determining the root cause and fixing the cause of the problem. Thus, once the user (customer or technical personnel) detects a problem, he first tries to identify the type of problem in order to search for the relevant fix. Especially in case of software problems in multi-tier information technology (IT) environment with complex system dependencies, the user may experience a front-end issue caused by a back-end problem. Thus, the problem may be only the effect of an underlying issue within the IT environment and, on one hand, the fixes found may not address the root cause, while on the other hand, the root cause may be buried in large amounts of logs, traces, and monitoring data from healthy resources involved in the propagated failure. Analyzing all the available logs and monitoring data is time consuming and error prone, therefore the PDR process would benefit from filtering the data related to the failing resource.
An example of a multi-tier environment is an e-business system which is supported by an infrastructure including for example the following subsystems connected by local and wide area networks: web based presentation services, access services, application business logic, messaging services, database services and storage subsystems. The existing solutions that provide problem determination are limited in that they are problem specific and as such lack the potential of being applied to wider type of issues. Other known methodologies use only one type of the available information, overlooking or ignoring information that may be relevant to the problem at hand. Yet other known methods provide particular approaches to the PDR technology that is applicable in specific scenarios only.